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The applause was hearty and sustained. It nearly died but somewhere in the room the volume was raised and others joined in. No, it wasn’t a concert, nor was it for an entertainer or popular celebrity. A middle-aged indigenous man stood with his head bowed – seemingly overwhelmed at what was happening and the fact that it was happening at all. It nearly didn’t. For some months before in a wave of deep despair he drove his speeding commodore into a concrete pole. Six airbags prevented another suicide statistic.
If the despair before the attempt was bad enough, the depression after was worse. The addition of ‘failed attempt’ brought another layer of shame that seemed beyond help. He was ‘seen to’, counselled and monitored, but the trauma persisted and the black cloud of depression remained.
“Do you still do therapy?” I was asked. A close friend of his sister was impressed with the training materials I had provided. Her trainees were front line health workers from remote communities in Arnhem Land. The trainer had been on a search for new approaches to old problems in emotional health. “There has to be something better because we are hardly making a difference” she said. She found what she was looking for in the UK, then chanced upon my name as the first Australian qualified in the approach. I was happy to use my time in lock-down during Covid to make videos and resources she could use. However, therapy by telephone was another thing altogether for me. I hesitated, and relied on that good old standby response: “It depends”. She wanted to give her friend my name, for her brother was in a very dark place. It still depended, for people can get out of dark places without me. “He works with aboriginal women to get their kids back and aboriginal men in rehab and prisons. He is the best healer we have and we can’t afford to lose him”. I didn’t hesitate after that, and when his sister contacted me I told her I would be happy to talk to him.
Some time later he reached out and talk we did. For hours, time only a retiree could spend. It didn’t take long to feel like kindred spirits. I discovered we were both mavericks bucking a system in a passionate defence of the marginalized, and sadly, earning more condemnation than applause. I discovered something else. The trauma was not linked to the horrific crash, but the deep shame coming from his being sacked in front of his colleagues in a job he loved. The very public humiliation would upset anyone of us, but the sense of shame felt by this indigenous man pushed him into a dark place that got even darker.
My therapeutic approach is very client-centred – short on analysis and long on finding out how they see themselves. Knowing their ‘essence’ or their deepest sense of identity is important, sometimes they know it, sometimes we discover it together. “What is your totem?” I asked. “I am a Torres Strait Islander and my totem is the diamond stingray.” He also said he doesn’t think about it much, not that unusual for those living in urban areas like Canberra.
During my years of private practice, the removal of the effects of trauma has been more successful than any other therapeutic intervention. There is good reason that the technique was mandated by the UN for use by villagers in post-genocide Rwanda, it is simple, fast and effective. And so it was in this case. While not necessarily part of the process, I always ‘value add’ while they are still deeply relaxed. I take the opportunity to add helpful metaphors to consolidate change for we are dealing with the emotional brain which is pre-language and pre-thought. Coming from our recent understanding of why humans dream, is a fresh appreciation of stories, especially ones with the client’s own metaphors.
A long-held mantra of mine is ‘success breeds success, but also spite, jealousy and envy’. So I could relate to his work history of being the best healer in a system using every foul means in their power to pull down the high flyers. So I used the stingray with its shiny surface as being impossible to hold back. It owns the ocean, has few predators and moves with such elegance over the Thursday Island shoreline.
It didn’t take long to see that it had worked. When we next spoke, with a new found excitement, he told me he had had an epiphany. “I have been fighting against the system, I now need to work smarter. Waiting for the tide to change is better than struggling against the it” he told me. I was concerned, for the tide to me represented business as usual, and that it was not for turning. I needed to be sure he would still go into bat for mothers wanting their children back, the prisoners and addicts needing hope. I needn’t have worried.
His passion for advocacy and healing was revitalized. He couldn’t wait to get employed again so he volunteered where the need was greatest. His presentation slide said it all; titled ‘understanding the oceans, tides and currents’, it said of the stingray: ‘it looked like it owned the sea, and knew where it was going … sometimes staying still, always in control, and hassled by nothing.’ More epiphanies followed leading him to use stories and metaphor to amazing benefit for incarcerated indigenous suicide survivors. The presentation slides didn’t show us the prisoners or the insides of their prison, but we could see the insides of a process that worked to restore dignity and hope again.
It nearly didn’t happen. When a ‘call for papers’ for a national First Nations Suicide conference came out I encouraged him to present. I countered his ‘that’s not my thing’ with ‘if you’re not qualified to speak about indigenous suicide who the hell is?’. It worked. His presentation entitled ’Six commodore airbags – a suicide survivor’s story’ had listeners spell-bound. Many teared up, especially when he asked his therapist to join him onstage where two cultures embraced. Perhaps no wonder the applause was sustained.

I have been invited to speak at a First Nations Mental Health conference in Cairns next month. People ask “What are you going to talk about?” I mean a fair question to an old white guy. My topic is ‘Stories That Heal’ or the role of therapeutic storytelling. Stories like this:

Healing Mission
It was toward dusk when I finally arrived at Ngukurr. Not that I could see much on this, my first visit to the community, for the smoke from a welcome to country ceremony lay heavy in the still evening air. But I could see the RV’s, hundreds of them I learned later, most of them ‘grey nomads’ but several families too. Welcomed to country for a very special reason and on one condition – that they provide accommodation for at least two invited guests for two nights. The invitees were there to experience the premiere of a First Nations theatrical production titled Healing Mission, a play written and performed by indigenous people from the community.

Formerly known as Roper River Mission, Ngukurr is a community of some 2000 residents located near the Roper River in Arnhem Land, about 330 km south-east of Katherine. Some time ago, a small but determined group of women wanted to celebrate the centenary of the arrival of missionaries and the setting up of a church and school. It should have been a straightforward undertaking but it wasn’t. An equally determined group, mainly men led by an elder that saw little reason to celebrate the event, pushed back. It is unclear what drove their resistance, as best anyone can gather the reasons are a mixture of culture, theology, and a claim that the missionaries did more harm than good. In what seems to be the only stated view of the resisters they claim: “They brought a view of God that is not the God of our country, but one that helps white people get their way”. The only celebration they would be part of is one that respected dreaming and the Great Creator Spirit. As a non-churched believer I think ‘good luck with that idea’.

It seems good luck showed up – like amazing good luck. It was luck, for example that enabled the warring factions to arrive at an agreement of sorts and get the show on the road, so to speak. Opinions differ as to how they came to work together, but one version has it that a group of teenage girls, home from boarding school on the Queensland coast, grew exasperated with the discord, which by this time had become community-wide. They took matters into their own hands and proposed an imaginative way forward – write a play about the history of the missionaries, include the story of Ngukurr’s famous Anglican minister from boat-boy to ordained priest, and let the audience decide what was harm and what was good from the missionary endeavour in East Arnhem Land.

Before the audience could decide anything, however, a lot of work had to be done. The best hope of writing a play lay with the girls, but they had returned to boarding school. Curiously, the leader of the resistance, a respected elder, had had years to ponder the role of missionaries. Initially experiencing being their favoured son, he had considered training for ordination in the church, but he began to realise how many deeply-held beliefs would have to be laid aside. He was not prepared to discard his convictions and connection to the spirituality of the land, and as he began to question aspects of white man’s theology the ‘favoured son’ title soon become dangerous exile. While banished from the church, he held his status as elder in the community. However, playwright he was not.

Now as you know, I had only recently arrived in the community, so gathering insights as to how the play, now set for the world’s stage, came into being did not come easily. My hasty information-gathering however, did convince me of one thing. Somewhere in the process the movers and shakers had the good sense to search beyond their regions and follow the trails of indigenous people who left homelands and had made their mark in white-man’s world of theatre, music and event management. The search yielded amazing talent, and most important of all, talented and experienced people who had still retained a deep love of their culture – just waiting to be asked it seemed.

A big ask, but as it turns out, not too big. The playwright for example, herself a Yolnu woman, now a professor of theatre and dance at Macquarie University, enlisted the assistance of her post-graduate students. The students were delighted with the challenge, for they knew that their professor was extremely well connected in corporate, media, and government circles, and they knew also that her passion never failed to bring about great things. Great things like funding for them to travel to Ngukurr to interview the community members of both factions and weave a story that made a rich tapestry of lived experience. A tapestry with threads of such colour and diversity that any differences were beautifully woven into a single transcending whole. A story now ready for the stage, well not quite, a story ready for direction and production.

The professor did not reach the top of her game without having plays of hers directed and produced by people she trusted. People that she could entrust the birthing and coming to stage of her creation with nothing of the cultural sensitivities and subtle nuances missing. People who made themselves available for weeks of working with community where actors had to be cast from raw stock. And people, like the professor, that were passionate and not the kind to give up when things got fractious. Yes, there were resisters still, as there are in every community. Resisters to people from ‘outside’; to change of lifestyle; to giving up things; the people that did not share the vision of replacing what is with what could be. Ones that failed to see the amazing opportunity to be proud people once again, to take centre stage instead of hiding behind the theatre, dignity lost in a fog of shame.

And now the stage is set. More than one hundred dignitaries, many personally invited by the professor and also a fair contingent from the girl’s boarding school were there. For many, this was to be their first exposure to First Nation peoples’ story, and certainly their first ‘on country’. Reading the invitee list beforehand, it strikes me that rarely, if ever, has an audience been so diverse; members of the political, religious, corporate, academic tribes, merging into a coherent, observant, waiting, and yes somewhat uncertain whole. Guided to their seats by young community members, they lose their tribal identity and become part of a single age-old humanity witnessing the great drama of life played by actors on a mission – to bring together, to rise above differences, and, above all, to heal.

My son shouted me a gold-pass ticket to see Top Gun – Maverick. No wonder it is breaking box office records – there is something about fighter pilots. It reminded me that somewhere in my files of patient records is a fighter pilot story. When I came home from the US I found it, made some minor changes and here it is:

(Name removed) is an 11 year old high-functioning Asperger’s boy; extremely bright; excelling at everything he does – swimming, surf-lifesaving, school work, with a flawless memory for detail. But, impossible to get along with. School demanded parents get ‘him seen to’; parents had him ‘seen to’ by all sorts of diagnostic professionals. In the mother’s words, they were all long on symptoms but short on solutions. So, out of some desperation she contacted me.

The first session did not go well. He didn’t want to go through the ‘being seen’ process all over again, gave me a summary of all the other people who had tried to work with him and what they had told him. His mother, becoming increasingly embarrassed, tried to moderate the scathing assessments of the professionals he had visited. The contempt for anything his mother said was undisguised, and you could imagine how she felt about being shown up in front of me. I felt for her, and after listening patiently, and with more recklessness than professionalism, I told him that no child in my presence speaks to his mother like that. I gave him a few helpful suggestions of a general nature and left it at that. I certainly did not expect any more contact.

His mother rang, and to my surprise said the boy wanted to come back and talk with me again. I agreed, but only on the condition that he be on his own. I started him working on a mind map – some way of organizing his thinking. On a follow-up visit he brought his completed mind map. As I expected it was a brilliant piece of work – this lad was aiming to make his mark on the world as a fighter pilot. Talk therapy I realized, would only work if it was in a context of activity. So I outlined the next project: making a clay original, applying latex rubber to make a mould, then casting a product in the mould before applying special metallic finishes. He chose to make a boar’s head with big tusks, he had in mind a small version of what one would see from the wall of a hunting lodge in Europe. Like I said, he was high-functioning. Very. While working away together I told him this story:

At the International Airshow recently, an American F14 Tomcat put on an impressive aerobatic display, and as the fighter landed, hundreds of people crowded around the area where it parked waiting to see the pilot. As the shimmering grey beast settled down, a ladder was placed alongside the cockpit, the canopy lifted, and out climbed the pilot. He carried his helmet and oxygen mask, paused on the top of the ladder and acknowledged the applause from the crowd. A minibus was parked nearby, and the rest of his ground crew were waiting for him. He walked toward them, and then an amazing thing happened.
He noticed a teenage girl in a wheelchair, and without hesitation turned and walked toward her, crouched down in front of her, talked at her level, signed his name on her program then tapped her gently on the knee before walking away. The crowd cheered.

“Do you know why they cheered?” I asked the boy. He didn’t, more concerned about getting the tusks to stay in place on the boar’s snout. I continued.

“The crowd had just seen one of the world’s best fighter pilots on display – no question this pilot knew his stuff and had just proved it. But when he chose to acknowledge someone who likely would never walk, let along fly a plane, he became more than a great fighter pilot, he became a great person. He showed that in the moment of his glory, he could be aware of others, to bring a memorable moment to someone who would appreciate it – that’s why the crowd cheered. You could well become the best fighter pilot in the business, but if other people don’t like you, all your skill doesn’t count for much. But, when you can be the best, and still show that you care about others, that’s what really matters”.

When the boy’s mother returned, she looked at the boar’s head and tried unsuccessfully to convey the impression that this was the thing people ‘seeing’ her son usually did. She phoned several days later expressing gratitude that her son was acting so much better toward his siblings, and wanted to know what I had done to bring about what she believed was the beginning of better things. My response was to for her to ask her son what we had done together, and if details were not forthcoming, prompt his memory with some reference to a fighter pilot.

She never did to get to understand what had happened, but wanted to discuss further appointments. I proposed a series of workshop sessions using ‘stealth learning’ – the boar’s head and more design projects being the context for other dimensions of learning based on a new understanding of the ‘context blindness’ of the Autism/Asperger’s disorder. It was some time before I had a reply. The parents had heard about another specialist in this disorder, and they had a referral to see him.

As I put the boar’s head back in the clay-bin, I wondered if the specialist would use such things, or more to the point, a fighter pilot.

I am not sure if you have ever sat on the footpath outside a building site with your Grandson. If you have you will share my delight; if you haven’t you have something to look forward to. For more than an hour we watched three tower cranes lifting building materials skyward, cement trucks manoeuvring into very tight spaces, huge semi-trailers backing between stacks of scaffolding and whatnot, and workers of every size, nationality and gender doing their thing. But the thing is, I don’t think there was one of them that did not notice the little three-year-old sitting with his grandfather watching the action. The truck drivers had to watch their mirrors but still noticed Lucas and honked the horn. The crane doggers took a special interest and gave him the thumbs-up while they blew their whistles and the load they had just secured would spiral way above our head.
It felt so good to see men and women at work with such humanity. They were working hard, and I have no doubt their bodies would ache at the end of the day. From the footpath, they seemed to be happy. I was reminded of so many people I had dealt with in therapy, and raised the importance of ‘purposeful action’ – these people may have become physically tired, but emotionally they felt part of something that gave them purpose and meaning.

Looking at my photos later I noticed on the security fence: ‘Choate Construction – 100% employee owned.’ I had to google that later and find out what sort of company it was. Yes the sign meant what it said, and I also learned they had just taken out a national workplace safety award. They pride themselves in being a ‘family’ and looking after each other. Their patented railing system is used on building sites all over the country. I am sure the ‘thumbs up’ to a little boy was part of a deeper job satisfaction. In a world where so much attention is directed toward stuff being pulled down and destroyed, these workers were lifting up and pouring concrete. And, in the land of corporate capitalism where so many workers do not share fairly in the rewards for their effort, here was an inspiring example of people-as-family, not just ‘employees’.
To get to this land and come home again we flew Qantas. Yes, we were part of that well-publicised delay in Dallas, Texas, and I do not intend to join the pile-on against the national carrier. But I do want to say this. Travelling folk understand things can go wrong, after all the machines that take us across oceans are complex and to leave one country and arrive in another requires a lot of moving parts. And a lot of people. That is my point. The travelling folk, or at least as far as I could tell, the several hundred we were with, can deal with things that don’t function as they need to, but what made people angry was there were no Qantas employees to be seen or heard. The little we were told came from non-Qantas staff, and they seemed just as confused as we were about the representatives of the company being missing in action. Perhaps they didn’t care, after all their company is still fighting in court for their right to dismiss staff without proper consideration, legal or moral. The very opposite of ‘family’ rather than employees.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Since the early eighties, I have had an interest in successful well-run companies. A book entitled ‘In Search of Excellence – lessons from America’s best-run companies’ came out about that time, and I remember reading about Delta Airlines. So while in Atlanta recently, we had the opportunity to visit the Delta Museum. What a delight. I found out that what has become one of the world’s best airlines began as a crop dusting company in the Louisiana delta region. Formed to deal with the boll-weevil devastating the cotton crops, it soon grew into a passenger carrier and then a major global airline. The early aeroplanes are on display, along with the major types of post-war propeller planes through to modern jets. Very interesting, especially the opportunity to walk all around them as well as inside.
The thing that struck me most was that during the fuel price increases and economic hard times during the eighties, Delta refused to cut staff. This prompted three cabin staff to organise a fund-raising campaign to raise three million dollars to buy a next generation jet as a sign of gratitude and confidence in the airline’s future. Not surprising, after nearly thirty years’ service, it is an aeroplane proudly on display and housed in its own hangar. I don’t think there is anything like that at the Qantas museum in Longreach. It is difficult to raise funds to buy a new jet if you are missing in action, or worse still, without a job at the airline.
I write about a little boy sitting on the footpath; of cranes, cement trucks and aeroplanes, but it is people that count. They are integral to the many moving parts, and when they feel a sense of belonging and family loyalty, of being appreciated and valued, they make a worthwhile contribution. Things get built, and people get to faraway places. I just hope it is this world that my grandson gets to play his part in. I can hear the dogger’s whistle and see their thumbs up to that.